Herald of the Dreadhorde

A 3/2 for four whose real payload is back-loaded onto its own death: when this Zombie Warrior hits the graveyard, two +1/+1 counters land on your Army, growing a permanent that outlives the creature that fed it. That structure inverts how you hold it. This is not a creature you protect but one you spend, because trading it in combat or feeding it to a sacrifice outlet converts a middling body into counters that persist on a separate permanent even after the original is gone. The trigger is strictly death-gated, so the conversion is not automatic: exile and bounce answers deny it entirely, and a block only pays off if the creature actually dies rather than merely trades blows. The design's engine is that each amass trigger banks onto the same Army token, so chaining several Army-makers folds body after body into one board presence that compounds, one graveyard trip at a time. The resulting Army is still a creature and dies to a wrath like anything else, but the counters it has banked represent value your opponent already had to answer once. Where most creatures ask you to keep them alive, this one is built to be given away: an attacker whose contribution begins the moment it stops being one.